Memorial day and Labor Day frame the Summer here in the United States.
I wish holidays would happen on the real days instead of the more convenient Mondays.
There is a reason for that. I live up here in Montana and on the last day of May I insist it is time to turn the heat off. Most years I do. The only exception I can bring to mind is in 2001 when it snowed, I mean SNOWED, on the 6th of June. Power went off, our tree broke in half and we had an infant in the house. That was the year I gave in and turned the heat on for one day.
You have heard me lament many times that we have two seasons. Winter and July. Yesterday was Memorial Day, so says the Holiday Committee.
We generally go to the cemetery and place apples on the grave sites of people we know. The Christie family has been here since the dawn of man so we buy a big bag of apples. Believe it or not, I hobby in Ancestry, I found ancestors buried in block 13. How cool is that. They are ? cousins x times removed and have been there for a very long time. They don’t have stones so I bought a ceramic angel that sits between the man and his wife. They get an apple, too.
I’ve been wanting to take some photos on my camera of a landscape as big as Montana that is sporting a color I call ‘new green.’ But the sun refuses to come out to play for the time it would take me to arrive and set up for a mini shoot.
As luck has it, the sun was in and out, yesterday, but when I got the camera in my hands the memory card was full. 800+ photos were in there. Remember when cameras only held 12, 24, or 36 exposures? On the way home from leaving apples I had my darling husband stop on the tracks near the lumber yard so I could take a few pictures with my cell phone.
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At no time were we in danger as I took the photo on the tracks with a powered up train engine looking back at us. The conductor, however, thought we were daft and he laid on his whistle at us. So, we moved on. Maybe he was just saying hello.
Come back tomorrow and visit with my guest for Writerly Wednesday and don’t touch anything sharp!
Comments
One response to “Yesterday, with my camera and cellphone”
Hey Sally, we’re not in Montana…further south and east in Illinois. But I hear ya about Memorial Day weather. Many’s the years when the kids were small, I’d sign them up for the first 2 weeks of swimming lessons in early June. They’d stand on the side of the pool with their teeth chattering, asking, “Mom, I really don’t have to get into the pool do I?” I’d remind them that I had already paid for the lessons so yes they did…besides, it’s a heated pool! And I wanted to be sure they all knew how to swim better than I do, since my Mom was too protective of me to let me have lessons (yes, that makes little sense, but you had to know my Mom!)
As for the train pictures, I grew up in a town west of Chicago that had one of the biggest roundhouses for the railroads (described to me as like a turntable big enough for a train to sit on while it was cleaned, then turn around so it could move forwards out of the warehouse.) Trains routinely stopped in our town, blocking all of the streets. My brother and I would hop on the joints in-between the freight cars and off the other side, to by-pass the train. Looking back I’m amazed we never got hit by another train on the 2 other sets of tracks, or fell off when the freight started moving. Like I tell my own kids, growing up is a combination of paying attention and dumb luck.